Friday, May 16, 2014

LMAYQ: Cellular Cells

Time to get back to Answering Some Questions. Where I attempt to answer the search-engine questions which have led you to The Cellular Scale. I mainly try to answer questions that I am sure are not answered anywhere on this blog.

1. "What does a cellular cell look like?"

Good question. First of all, what is a cellular cell? Is it different from a regular cell?
Cells look like all sorts of things. Some look like footballs, some look like sea coral. Some cells look like little rafts, drifting down a river.

This is a real true very good question. The strength of the Golgi stain lies precisely in its sparse labeling. If it labeled all cells it would be useless because you wouldn't be able to see the elaborate morphology of a neuron's dendrites.

However, even though it has been around for almost 150 years, it is still unclear why it doesn't stain all cells. It is not clear how it 'decides' to stain one cell and not the one next to it. This is always a bit of a problem for people wanting to use the Golgi stain, because you always have that nagging feeling that maybe you are seeing only the sick neurons or only the neurons with random undiscovered quality X, and so forth. But it is a well respected technique, and journals regularly publish scientific articles which rely on the Golgi stain.